Archive for the ‘HOSPITALS CLINICS’ Category

For billionaire Manoj Bhargava (like many other people), the world is a place full of problems. Between poverty, pollution, food growth, and access to water, the list seems to be ever growing. That’s why he’s recently pledged to spearhead a group aimed at giving away all their billions to turning things around for mankind.

Here’s how he plans to do it…

It seems like a promotional video, but the message behind it is so important.

Regardless of whether he’s naive or not, there’s no question his motives are pure. It’s certainly something society — and the world — needs. Stereotypes and politics aside, there are many wealthy people that truly help the needy…and we hope the number of those people increases.

HERVEY Bay will soon be home to one of Australia’s most advanced cancer care facilities which is expected to fast track cancer treatment.

A cutting-edge plan for cancer care services in the Wide Bay will accelerate cancer detection and treatment, and offer patients a clear pathway for the course of their illness.

The Cancer Care Strategic Plan 2015-2018 will deliver a rapid response to any high suspicion of cancer, make use of 26 new cancer care chairs in two new facilities and employ more specialists, surgeons and nurses.

Two new cancer care facilities costing a total of $35 million – one at Hervey Bay Hospital and one in Bundaberg – will bring cancer care operations under one roof and enable better communication between treatment partners, including video links to some of Australia’s top specialists.

WBHHS Chief Executive Adrian Pennington has hailed the WBHHS Cancer Care Strategic Plan 2015-208 as one of the most ambitious and forward-thinking in the nation.

“This is the most advanced cancer care strategic plan I’ve seen since coming to Australia,” Mr Pennington said.

Under the plan, in cases where there is a high suspicion of cancer, patients will have their first specialist appointment within 14 days under a “red referral” system.

The plan also aspires to deliver services where patients with a confirmed cancer diagnosis will have their first cancer treatment or other management within 30 days of the decision to treat.

Three urologists are expected to be appointed by the end of 2015, giving local access to further specialist services and offering earlier detection and treatment of prostate cancer and four medical oncologists have been recruited by WBHHS, with the last of these expected to have taken up the role by February 2016.

An interventional gastroenterologist is already in place in Maryborough, allowing rapid endoscopy, which increases the potential for early detection of cancers.

A prostate cancer support nurse has also been appointed, adding to the existing team of cancer care coordinators, including specialist breast cancer support.

But surgery also appears to be getting a little safer, with the audit, which covers almost every surgery death in Australia, finding fewer faults with the medical care provided to patients than it has in the past.

Audit chair Guy Maddern said of the deaths where there were concerns, about 5 per cent involved serious adverse events that were likely to have contributed to the person’s death.

In about 8 per cent of cases, the audit found some area of care could have been delivered better.

“These are the sorts of deaths where it was a difficult surgery, and instead of going straight to an operation, maybe additional X-rays and imaging should have been pursued, or maybe the skill set of the team that was operating could have been more appropriate,” he said.

“Sometimes, of course, the result would have been exactly the same.”

Surgical deaths: when things go wrong

Percentage of deaths with issues identified, by specialty

Professor Maddern said some surgeons, particularly in general surgery, orthopaedics, and, to a lesser extent, neurosurgery, still needed to work on deciding not to proceed with surgeries where the risks outweighed the benefits.

“People are thinking a little bit longer and harder about whether an operation is really going to alter the outcome,” he said. “These are the types of cases where you know before you begin that it is not going to end well.”

However, in some areas with many patients with complex conditions, things were just more likely to go wrong.

The report, which includes data from nearly 18,600 deaths over five years, found in 2013 the decision to operate was the most common reason a death was reviewed.

Overall, delays in treatment, linked to issues such as patients needing to be transferred or surgeons delaying the decision to operate, were still the most common problem, and in about 26 per cent of the deaths no surgery was performed.

Between 2009 and 2013, the report shows a decrease in the proportion of patients who died with serious infection causing sepsis from 12 per cent to 9 per cent, while significant post-operative bleeding decreased from 12 per cent to 11 per cent. Serious adverse events halved from 6 per cent of deaths in 2009 to 3 per cent in 2013.

Every public hospital now participates in the audit, along with all private hospitals in every state except NSW. However, Professor Maddern said he was pleased NSW private hospitals had agreed to participate in future.

Doctors are now provided with regular case studies from the audit, in which de-identified information about the death is provided, so they can learn from any mistakes.

“What we are seeing is an overall decrease in deaths associated with surgical care, which may be due to many things, and we think the audit is helping,” he said. “It’s making people think twice.”

Professor Guy Maddern’s tips on protecting yourself in surgery

1. If you are away from a major hospital, get yourself to one. A particular problem, Professor Maddern says, exists when rural patients resist transfers to major hospitals because they don’t want to leave their families.

2. Lose weight and don’t smoke.The proportion of deaths where obesity was a factor increased slightly this year. “An operation done on a thin person relative to a fat person can have a completely different outcome,” Professor Maddern says. This is particularly important for older people, who have the most operations.

3. Go to a hospital that performs a lot of the type of surgery you are going to have, particularly if it is complex. Remember, practice makes perfect.

Hospitals are death trapsSample pic only.
Many Australians and thousands of Americans are killed every month – and many more are badly hurt or sickened – by carelessness, stupidity, and neglect in the one place where they least expect it.

The hospital.

New government numbers prove that zoo animals get better care than our seniors – because one in seven hospitalized Medicare patients suffer from serious medical mistakes.

These are mistakes that require life-sustaining interventions, or cause permanent harm… and that’s not even the worst part of it. The same study showed that nearly 400 people die every month in Australian and 15,000 every month in the U.S. as a result of those mistakes.

That adds up to nearly 185,000 deaths a year, most of them seniors.

And while I think every one of them should be considered preventable, the government is a more generous critic than I. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which conducted the study, says 44 percent of those mistakes could have been caught and prevented.

Still, that adds up to at least 81,400 unnecessary deaths in a single year, and the biggest reason for them can be summed up in a single word: DRUGS. Medication errors – the wrong drug, or the right drug in the wrong amount – accounted for more than half the deaths in the new study.

Other patients suffered from preventable infections, falls, incorrect procedures, bleeding problems and more. Some suffered from more than one mistake – and one elderly patient hit the opposite of a jackpot: Six errors in one hospital stay.

The only encouraging stat here is the cost of all those mistakes – $4 billion a year. That’s practically pocket change in an era of trillion-dollar stimulus and bailout packages.

The Department of Health and Human Services says fixing the system will require new laws, specialized programs, help from patients, yada yada yada.

Give me a break! Just enforce some real safety standards – and axe any doc who screws up.

And since fatigue accounts for more of these errors than anyone will admit, how about this: Stop letting hospitals force residents to work 30-hour shifts and 80-hour weeks.

Give docs, nurses, surgeons, interns and everyone else the rest they need, and maybe they’ll actually be awake on the job most of the time.

Canine Bone Marrow Transplants

Now Being Offered

At NC State University USA.

Science (Sep. 3, 2008) — Dogs suffering from lymphoma will be able to receive the same type of medical treatment as their human counterparts, as North Carolina State University becomes the first university in the nation to offer canine bone marrow transplants in a clinical setting.

Dr. Steven Suter, assistant professor of oncology in NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, received three leukophoresis machines donated by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Leukophoresis machines are designed to harvest healthy stem cells from cancer patients. The machines are used in conjunction with drug therapy to harvest stem cells that have left the patient’s bone marrow and entered the bloodstream.

The harvested cancer-free cells are then reintroduced into the patient after total body radiation is used to kill residual cancer cells left in the body. This treatment is called peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.

The machines, once used for human patients, are suitable for canine use without modification, as bone marrow therapy protocols for people were originally developed using dogs.

“It’s not a new technology, it’s just a new application of an existing technology,” Suter says. “Doctors have been treating human patients with bone marrow transplantation for many years, and there have been canine patient transplants performed in a research setting for about 20 years, but it’s never been feasible as a standard therapy until now.”

Canine lymphoma is one of the most common types of cancer in dogs, but the survival rate with current treatments is extremely low. Peripheral blood stem cell transplantation, in conjunction with chemotherapy, has raised human survival rates considerably, and it is hoped that dogs will see the same benefits.

“We know that dogs who have received bone marrow transplants have a cure rate of at least 30 percent versus about 0 to 2 percent for dogs who don’t receive the transplants,” Suter adds. “The process itself is painless for dogs – the only thing they lose is a bit of body heat while the cells are being harvested.”

Unequal access drives fertility tourism, experts say

LONDON, Sep. 14, 2010 (Reuters) — Patients who cross borders in search of cheaper, more available fertility treatment can now choose from more than 100 countries but may be putting themselves and their babies at risk, experts said Tuesday.

Nurses display quadruplet baby girls born by caesarean section at Pringadi hospital in Medan, North Sumatra September 29, 2009. REUTERS/Stringer

The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) and the International Federation of Fertility Societies (IFFS) said a survey of reproductive services showed wide disparities between laws and practice in many countries. As a result, patients returning home may face legal or medical problems.

“Although in principle the care of foreign and local patients should essentially be the same and fit the best possible standards, there is evidence that it is not always so,” ESHRE’s Francoise Shenfield told reporters at a briefing.

A survey of 105 countries by the IFFS found that cultural, religious and social differences in attitudes to fertility treatments such as using donated eggs, sperm or embryos mean there are wide variations in the number of clinics that offer treatment, and the services they provide.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) involves removing eggs from a woman’s ovaries and combining them with sperm in a lab. The strongest embryos are then implanted into a woman’s womb. In theory, the eggs, sperm and embryos can all be donated.

The IFFS survey found there are over 500 fertility clinics in India and about 615 in Japan, but only 66 in Britain, 120 in Germany, 200 in Spain and around 360 in Italy.

IFFS education director Ian Cooke said discrepancies in access prompted patients to travel abroad for treatment, but could leave them in medical, financial or legal difficulties.

LEGAL DIFFERENCES

One major problem is the rules on the maximum number of embryos that can be transferred to a woman’s womb after IVF.

In Britain and Scandinavia only one or two are allowed, but other countries have higher limits or none at all — a factor that can increase the number of multiple pregnancies that can pose risks for both mothers and babies.

Freezing embryos is banned in Germany, Italy and Croatia, but freezing eggs before they are fertilized is allowed. In Britain the removal of donors’ anonymity has led to a severe shortage in donated sperm.

Sperm and egg donation is banned completely in many Islamic countries, and in France lesbians are not allowed access to donated sperm. Turkey has recently banned anyone going abroad to receive donated sperm or eggs — a law which the experts said was almost completely unenforceable.

“If a woman goes on holiday and comes back pregnant, who is to tell exactly how or when she got pregnant?” said Shenfield.

Both IFFS and ESHRE support the rights of patients to travel to receive fertility treatment, but said in a joint statement that “ideally, this should take place in their home country.”

They urged national health authorities to try to harmonize standards to increase the safety of patients and offer equal treatment for all those who want it.

“The variation in international laws relating to infertility treatment is one of the reasons that cause couples to seek cross-border treatment,” said Cooke. “Whilst this is unavoidable we call for international standards to ensure these patients receive consistent advice and safe treatment.”

No doubt that loud noises are bad for you, wrecking your hearing and even driving up your blood pressure. But silence can hurt you, too — at least when it’s what you don’t say to your doctor. Don’t fall into these clam-up traps:

1. You think something “isn’t worth bothering anyone about.” We know a 50-something guy who kept hoping that the shortness of breath he had while walking up the hill to work was just going to go away. Fortunately, he got himself to the hospital … where he survived his heart attack. We know you don’t want to hear that something’s amiss, but it’s better to hear it when you’re standing than for others to hear it when you’re about to go 6 feet down.

2. You think your appointment is over when you leave. You don’t get to ask your doc questions only after you’ve forked over your co-pay. Too many people leave their appointment and then say, “I wish I’d asked … whether I can have wine/when can I have sex,” and other essentials. Don’t rely on Dr. Google! Smart patients call or e-mail and ask!
3. You think that if the doctor didn’t bring it up, it’s not important. We can do lots of things, but mind reading isn’t one of them. We don’t know that you’ve been having erectile dysfunction, chest pains or an overwhelming desire to speak in Klingon unless you tell us. We don’t know what that last one means, either, but if it’s bothering you, mention it. Speaking up may be the healthiest move you’ve made.

The quick adoption and use of advanced new medicaltechnology and equipment

Unique methods

Some therapies are 100% non-invasive (no surgeries)

Immediate relief from severe pain (as fast as a week fromstart)

We can accept terminal cases (except for patients who aretoo frail to travel to China)

Fast results (within 30 days)

Minimal side-effects

Use of Traditional Chinese Medicine as an effective painreliever and as a supplemental treatment for boosting theimmune system

The best of the East and West

Some of our Pioneering Achievements:

The first to introduce Internal Gamma Knife or NuclearParticle Knife treatment into Guangzhou – one of the mostsophisticated cancer treatments in the world. This technologyhas been used for the last 4 years by our Chief Medicalconsultant to treat over 3000 patients successfully. The first Brachytherapy in Guangzhou was successfully done at ourcenter

The first radioactive holder therapy for esophagealcarcinoma in Guangzhou was successfully done by us

The first in China to use HIFU to successfully treat liver portalvein cancer bolt

No excision required for the successful treatment of breastcancer

No excision required for the treatment of rectum carcinoma

No excision of the esophagus required in cases of esophaguscarcinoma

The first Telemedicine center in Guangzhou where our expertise is made available to all

Special emphasis on the humane treatment of patients andfostering close doctor patient relationships.

Chinacancerhospital.com is dedicated to helping you to
understand your options in your fight against cancer.We hope the information provided on this website is enough for you to
make a decision to contact us to explore the best treatment plan for yourself or loved ones.

Our strength lies in bringing together three factors: vast experience, top expertise, and the latest medical technologies all in one location.

We understand that for many who have not visited China before
that the thought of going to a foreign country for treatment
may seem daunting. That is why we are committed to doing our best so that international enquiries for admission are dealt with efficiently and
quickly and we will provide the necessary information and help to ensure that you and your family’s visit and stay is most comfortable and hassle-free.